In the spring of 1459, six years after the conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet the ConquerorMore or less 800 kilometers away, Europe was witnessing one of the most horrific massacres in its history. Vlad III and his troops were besieging the walls of the town of Braşov, where Saxon merchants had helped his enemies and disobeyed his orders.
Historical accounts tell how Vlad’s forces razed and burned the town, capturing its inhabitants. But what followed was enough to put Vlad III on the list of the most brutal in human history. Vlad ordered the captives, children, men and women, to be gathered on a hill overlooking St. Jacob’s Church, before he ordered them all to be stabbed with long spears from the bottom to the top. He then ordered the spears with the impaled victims on them to be fixed along the cliffs, before setting up his tent and dinner table under the bodies of the dead and dipping his bread in their blood.
Later that same year, Vlad committed another crime after inviting a large number of “nobles” with their children and women to an Easter dinner. As soon as it was time to eat, his men burst in, stabbing the women and old men in front of the rest, and hanging them in front of the noblemen, whom Vlad ordered to be enslaved, where they died gruesome and slow deaths. You may not know much about Vlad III, but you probably know the legend of the vampire Dracula, which was inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel based on Vlad’s history.
Dracula, nicknamed “The Impaler” because of his brutal use of the impalement as a method of torture and execution, was widely recognized in his time and the ages that followed, a method he practiced on political opponents, prisoners of war, and even women and children, giving him a terrifying reputation that went beyond the borders of his native Wallachia to the Roman Empire His reputation soon spread to the European continent, where his practices became a common theme in historical codes and records, and estimates indicate that the number of his victims reached tens of thousands, making his name synonymous with systematic terror and political persecution.
Who was Dracula? What was his relationship with the Ottoman Empire represented by Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror? How did he commit the most horrific crimes of that era? How did he meet his end at the hands of the Ottomans?
Dracula From Ottoman patronage to hostility
and① ①Led Vlad III in 1431 in the Transylvania then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, which later became part of the Romania His father, Vlad II, known as “Dracul”, was one of the most prominent princes of the Aflak region. Educated by Byzantine and Romanian teachers under the guidance of Constantinople, which had not yet fallen to the Ottomans, Vlad studied a wide range of knowledge. Worth Vlad III inherited from his father the nickname Dracula, which meant “son of the dragon” and later changed its meaning to “son of the devil.” In 1431 AD, he joined a knightly organization called the Order of the Dragon, an organization founded by the Roman emperor in the early 15th century AD.
In 1436, Vlad II of Dracula fame took over the Avlak Principality, but his reign was short-lived, as he was overthrown in 1442 as a result of plots between local rivals and King Vladislav III of Hungary. However, Vlad was able to regain the throne a year later, with the help of Ottoman Sultan Murad II, following an agreement that required him to pay tribute to the Sublime Porte.
To strengthen this alliance, Vlad sent his two sons, Vlad III and Radu, to the Ottoman court in Edirne as hostages to ensure his loyalty. According to Erhan Akhan in his book The Sultan and Dracula, Vlad III spent those years in the Ottoman state, where he received an education in logic, literature and the Quran, learned the Ottoman Turkish language until he mastered it, received rigorous military training in horsemanship and martial arts, and even met Crown Prince Mehmet the Conqueror. After his father’s death, Vlad III returned to the Avlak to claim the throne, while his brother Radu remained at the Ottoman court.
As we see in the “History of Romania” by Ioan Bulovan and others, as the conflict between Prince Vlad II and the Transylvanian “boyar” nobles escalated, the latter plotted against him in coordination with John Hunyad, then regent of the Hungarian throne, resulting in his assassination in December 1447. His son and heir, Mircea, did not escape the same fate, as he was tortured and killed in a horrific way by being buried alive after he was blinded, in a scene that reflects the cruelty of the struggle for power.
As Muhammad Farid mentions in his book “History of the Ottoman Empire”, as the Ottoman Empire feared the penetration of Hungarian influence in the Aflak (Romania), it hastened to intervene militarily, installing the loyalist Vlad III as governor of the country, but his first term did not last long; Hunyad of Hungary re-conquered the principality and restored Vladislav II to power.
After his deposition, Vlad III preferred not to seek refuge with the Ottomans again because of the personal animosity that subsequently developed between him and Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. He took refuge in Moldova for a short time, and then in Hungary after the death of his ally Bogdan II, where he received the attention of John Hunyad, who appreciated his knowledge of Ottoman affairs and his strong hostility to the Sultanate, so he appointed him military advisor and sought to repair his relationship with his rival Vladislav II.
Vlad III stayed in Hungary until after the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453 by Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, an event that marked a strategic turning point in the balance of power in the region. The Ottoman expansion following this victory posed a direct threat to the eastern gateway to Central Europe, and by 1481 the Ottoman state had seized control of the entire Balkan Peninsula, ending the Vlad III dynasty after decades of continuous conflict.
In 1456, in the context of the Ottoman campaign to besiege Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, with the aim of weakening the Hungarian kingdom, John Hunyad led a counterattack in Serbia that led to the lifting of the siege, and Vlad III took advantage of the military and political preoccupation to return to the Avlak Principality, where he succeeded in regaining power in August 1456 for the second time.
Dracula in command
Following his return to the throne, Vlad III was faced with a dire reality of internal collapse and total chaos, as Florescu, Radu R. and Raymond T. McNally state in their book “Dracula. As Florescu, Radu R. and Raymond T. McNally state in their book “Dracula. The Prince of Many Faces; His Life and Times”, the country had just emerged from bloody conflicts that had weakened its economic structure, crime was rampant, agriculture and commerce had largely declined, and threats from within and without were increasing, so Vlad set himself a threefold project: Rebuild the economy, strengthen military defenses and fortify the country, and consolidate his political power.
On the political and social level, Vlad III moved towards a radical restructuring of the power pyramid, driven by his desire to take revenge on the boyars, whom he considered primarily responsible for his father’s death and the deteriorating conditions in the country. He liquidated a large number of them, replacing them with people outside the aristocratic elite whose loyalty he trusted, including some foreigners and free peasants. He also adopted extremist security policies, imposing harsh punishments such as the immediate killing of anyone who committed a crime, without exception or distinction between classes.
He also reorganized the army by forming village militias to be used when needed, while maintaining a private guard of mercenaries to whom he granted generous privileges. In his regional relations, he dealt harsh blows to the Transylvanian Saxon nobility, accusing them of colluding with the boyars against his rule. He massacred thousands in Braşov in 1459 and followed it up with a similar campaign in Sibiu in 1460, reinforcing his image as a bloody ruler who would not tolerate any threat to his power.
In 1459, after the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, Pope Pius II called for a new crusade against the Ottoman state. This campaign was assigned to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and Croatia, the son of the late commander John Hunyad, to last three years with papal financial support amounting to 40,000 gold pieces. However, this papal initiative did not receive the desired support from the kings of Europe, and actual support was limited to Vlad III, Prince of the Avlak, who expressed his readiness to join the campaign in support of the independence of his principality, which strengthened his position with the Pope and showed him as a reliable ally in the face of Ottoman expansion.
On the other hand, the year 1460 witnessed dramatic developments in the form of the capture and killing by the Ottomans of Mikhail Zelagy, heir to the throne of Hungary and Vlad III’s closest ally and most dangerous enemy, while passing through Bulgarian territory, and at the end of the same year, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror sent a delegation to Vlad III demanding that he pay the tribute dating back to 1459, estimated at 10,000 gold ducats, and that 500 young Avlakians serve in the Janissary Corps.
Vlad categorically rejected these demands, considering acquiescence to them as a tacit acceptance of Ottoman tutelage over the Avlak, which contradicts his relentless efforts to consolidate the emirate’s independence. The tension between the two sides escalated when Vlad ordered the Ottoman messengers’ turbans to be nailed on their heads after they refused to take them off in front of him, a scene that triggered a final rupture with the Ottoman state.
He also sent a letter to Saxon Transylvania in September 1460, warning of an imminent Ottoman invasion and calling for military support, which was true. The Fatih Sultan insisted on disciplining Vlad III. When Ottoman forces began crossing the Danube and imposing forced conscription, Vlad responded with a violent attack in which he took many prisoners and executed them in his famous style with the impalement, paving the way for an open confrontation that lasted until 1461, when Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror directly invited Vlad III to come to Constantinople to negotiate.
In late November 1461, Vlad III sent a letter to the Ottoman Sultan declaring his inability to continue paying tribute, justifying this by the depletion of the resources of the Avlak as a result of the fierce war with the Transylvanian Saxons. In his letter, he indicated that he could not leave the country for fear that the King of Hungary would take advantage of his absence and seize power, explaining his readiness to send gold to the High Porte when resources were available, and suggested that the Sultan send one of his men to rule in his name in the Avlak.
Turning point
However, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, after seeing intelligence reports confirming Vlad III’s alliance with the King of Hungary and refuting his claims, decided to send Hamza Pasha, at the head of a force of 1000 horsemen, to hold an ostensible meeting with Vlad while the real mission was to capture him and take him captive to Constantinople, but the Ottoman plans were not hidden from Vlad III, who managed to obtain prior information about their intentions. He mobilized his forces and ambushed them in the mountain passes north of the Georgiou region in Bulgaria, where he launched a surprise attack in which he used advanced fire tactics, such as hand cannons and gunpowder, and managed to surround the Ottoman force and eliminate most of its members, while capturing the rest, headed by Commander Hamza Pasha.
As the book “Vlad the Impaler. In his usual bloody style, Vlad ordered the execution of all prisoners on pylons, assigning the longest one to Hamza Pasha, as an expression of his military status and an insult to the Ottoman state. Following this victory, he continued his advance towards the Georgiou fortress, where he deceived the Ottoman garrison by using the Turkish language and disguising himself as one of the “Sepahiya” Ottoman knights, which enabled him to enter the fort, destroy it and kill those in it.
In a series of reprisals against Ottoman collaborators, he penetrated as far south as Bulgaria, and launched a brutal campaign that stretched 800 kilometers in two weeks, killing about 25,000 Turkish and Bulgarian Muslims. Vlad documented these military achievements in a second letter he sent to Matthias I of Hungary on February 11, 1462, detailing his successive victories.
The letter states: “I killed the peasants in Oplukitza and Novoselo; men and women, old men and children, as well as those at the mouth of the Danube to Rahova, near Kilia, and from the Lower Danube to Samovit and Gegen, we killed 23,884 Turks, not counting those whom we burned in their homes or whose throats were cut by our soldiers, so Your Majesty, you should know that I broke my peace with him (meaning Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror).”
During his military campaign against the Ottomans, Vlad III showed a selective policy towards the population, releasing Bulgarian Christians, encouraging their migration to the Avlak, while his campaign left thousands dead in several Bulgarian cities. In response, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, who was preoccupied with the siege of Corinth in Greece, sent an 18,000-strong force led by Grand Vizier Mahmoud Pasha to destroy the city of Braila, but Vlad succeeded in repelling the attack. These victories caused a wide resonance among the Christian world, and celebrations spread to many European cities, and contributed to the lifting of the siege of Corinth.
The end of the Ripper
In response to these developments, the Sultan decided to launch a major campaign to retake the Aflak, and set the launch date for either April 26 or May 17, 1462. Historians’ estimates of the strength of the Ottoman army varied, ranging from 60 to 400,000 fighters, while the report of the Venetian envoy Tomasi, contemporary to these events, estimated the number of regular and irregular soldiers at about 90,000, and the conqueror decided to appoint the handsome Prince Radu, or the third brother of Vlad, to head a force consisting of 4,000 horsemen.
For his part, Vlad III tried to gain the support of then King Corvinus of Hungary, even offering to convert him to Catholicism, but his attempts failed, so he resorted to declaring a general mobilization; including men, women, children and gypsies, and his forces were estimated at about 30,000 fighters, most of whom were peasants and shepherds, supported by mercenaries and bodyguards, in preparation for the impending battle.
As researcher Erhan Afyoncı mentions in his book “Mehmet the Conqueror. As the Ottoman forces were able to advance despite many obstacles, Vlad III resorted to scorched earth tactics, poisoning water sources, diverting riverbeds to create natural swamps that impeded movement, setting land traps and displacing villagers and their animals to the mountains, exhausting the Ottoman army as they advanced for days without food or water. Vlad used guerrilla warfare and even deliberately spread epidemics among the Ottoman ranks by sending patients with plague, leprosy, and tuberculosis to their camps, causing an epidemic within the army.
As historian Mehmet Maqsudoğlu writes in his book “Ottoman History”, the tension reached its peak on June 17, 1462, when Vlad III launched a daring night attack on the Ottoman camp south of the capital Targoviste. The attack began at three after dark and lasted until dawn the next day, causing chaos However, the attack failed to achieve its main objective of assassinating Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, as the tent that was attacked contained the Grand Viziers Mahmud Pasha and Isaac Pasha instead of the Sultan, while the failure of part of the attack was attributed to the inaction of a boyar commander who did not carry out the attack from the opposite side as planned.
Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror ordered his armies to continue marching towards the capital of the Avlaks, Trgoviste, but he was surprised upon arrival that it was empty and its doors were open, which raised suspicion, and accompanied by his soldiers, he entered the city and walked through its streets for about half an hour, surrounded by horrifying scenes of thousands of bodies of Ottoman soldiers and Bulgarian Muslims nailed to piles, in one of the most brutal horror images in history, where the longest piles were characterized by the body of Hamza Pasha, which had rotted.
Despite the differences between sources on the details of the scene, whether the location of the bodies or the presence of a garrison inside the capital, what historians agree on is that Sultan Fatih was shocked by the horror of the sight, which prompted him to take precautionary measures; he ordered his soldiers to sleep outside the city and fortify the camp with a wide trench for fear of a surprise attack, and insisted on eliminating Vlad III by all means.
A few days later, with the Sultan’s personal encouragement, Stefan III of Moldova, Vlad III’s cousin, launched an attack on the cities of Akkerman and Kilia to retake them from Vlad’s control, but the attack was repelled by the Wolakian forces loyal to Vlad or Dracula, Erhan Afyonge writes in his previous book.
Vlad III’s brother, Prince Radu, a handsome pro-Ottoman prince who had converted to Islam, was supplied by Fatih Sultan with Janissary troops and Sepahiya cavalry to end Vlad’s resistance once and for all, and Radu received continuous financial and military support from the Bab, enabling him to besiege Vlad in the castle of Buenari Vlad in the castle of Buinari, where the latter managed to escape after his wife committed suicide by throwing herself from the castle walls, and thus the Fatih Sultan succeeded in installing Radu as ruler over the Aflak, taking advantage of his alliance with the Boyar tribes who had turned against Vlad due to his previous oppressive policies against them.
When the situation was settled and the conqueror succeeded, he boarded the Ottoman fleet back to Edirne, which he reached on July 11, and the next day, loud celebrations were held in the capital to celebrate the victory over Dracula and the control of his country. Although Vlad had achieved three victories over his brother Radu’s forces by September, his bankruptcy and inability to pay mercenaries prompted him to turn to King Corvinus of Hungary for help, but the latter took advantage of the opportunity and arrested him for treason after fabricating a letter to the Ottoman Sultan that was falsely attributed to Vlad, allowing him to retain papal support without fighting a war.
Vlad was imprisoned in several locations, including Oratia, Visegrad and Buda, for a period ranging from a few months according to papal correspondence to 10 years according to other accounts, while it is believed that his release occurred as a result of mediation led by his cousin Stefan of Moldova, to counter the growing Ottoman threat north of the Danube.
After Radu’s death in 1475, Vlad III announced his restoration on November 26, 1476, with Hungarian support, but his third reign lasted only weeks, as the Fatih Sultan insisted on eliminating him permanently this time, so he sent Ottoman forces to him, who managed to kill him and behead him in a battle near the marshes of the Snagov Monastery in southern Romania, and his head was sent to the Ottoman Sultan, who displayed it on a stake in Edirne, while his body was buried in Kumana Monastery, which he himself had founded in 1461.
We conclude with the description of Vlad III or Dracula by the contemporary Ottoman historian Tursun Bey in his book “The History of Abul-Fatah”: “Vlad was a bloodthirsty infidel who paid tribute to the Sultan in the past and enjoyed his kindness and care, but later it turned out that he was like the pilgrims of the atheists, his injustice and mismanagement were indescribable. For example, if someone betrayed or committed a crime, he ordered the arrest of his mother, wife, children and even his relatives and ordered them to be killed on the stakes!”
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2025-05-31 22:07:00
